Zen 2

Today, I want to tell you about my bath tub. When we first moved into this apartment, I was pretty happy that in the upstairs bathroom there was both a shower and a separate bath tub. I don't generally enjoy taking baths, but for a few minutes I envisioned candles, wine, bubbles and soft Kenny G music (or Yanni, take your pick of middle-aged long-haired men making music for middle-aged women) playing in the background. Then I remembered that baths get old really fast. I'm usually in there for about six minutes when I get bored...or the wine starts going to my head and I get all panicked that I'll fall asleep and drown.

I knew right away that the separate shower would be sufficient for all of my bathing/relaxing needs and that the bathtub would go largely unused. So my imagination started running away with me. My first project was wanting to build an old fashioned still to make our own alcohol at home. I started looking up plans online, talking to people I knew who could weld things (another hobby I'd like to take up) and looking into how much it would cost. My plans came to a staggering halt when Kristian Kozelchik reminded me that home distilleries are illegal...and fire hazards. I tried to tell him that's why I was keeping it in a porcelain bathtub, but Kristian the cop wouldn't listen. Kristian my friend thought it was a pretty cool idea. That's the problem with having friends with law abiding jobs.

Next was the Koi fish pond. I always tend to take an idea to its extreme, even when the idea is still in concept stages (you may or may not have picked up on this) and I knew that if I got into Koi fish...I'd eventually want to get into the hardcore Koi world of finding the "right" fish and paying thousands of dollars for it. And Thousand dollar fish don't deserve to be kept in a bathtub where nobody's going to see it...I guess I could hold swanky parties, straighten my hair, only wear mod jewelry and drink neon colored martinis. "DAhling, you haven't LIVED until you've seen this Koi! It's a good thing I have it upstairs!" I don't do mod well. That idea was out.

Finally, I remembered this group of people I heard about who turn their bathtubs into motorboads and have Tub Races. http://www.bathtubbing.com/index.php. But I'm not sure the landlord would like me carting his bathtub around the country. Also, I don't have the time for a consuming hobby like that...nor do I have a trailer hitch.

After almost a year of an empty bath tub (it did have the leftover paint rollers and dropmat sitting in it from an adventure in painting my room) Deniece moved out and we had to move the cat's litter box out of the downstairs bathroom (now Lexi's bathroom) and into the bathroom upstairs. I resigned my bathtub to its fate of holding a cat litter box so the litter doesn't spread everywhere when Fatty kicks it around. I don't like cats, and I'm kind of bitter that Fatty puts the bathtub to better use than I ever could.

I think I'll take up welding.